Announcing: The Fall 2018 Nonfiction & Flash Prose Contest Winners

We are pleased to announce the winners of our Fall 2018 contest!

We opened to contest submissions in Nonfiction and Flash Prose in September through November, under the theme, DESIRE. We had Finalist Judge Jo Ann Beard judging Nonfiction, and Finalist Judge Nicole Walker, judging Flash Prose.

Nonfiction Contest, by Finalist Judge Jo Ann Beard

WINNER:“Magic, True or False,” by Kate Harding

Here’s what Beard had to say about the essay:

It’s a gorgeously sustained meditation on memory, spirituality, family, religion, loss and (somehow, miraculously) gain. The gain part is about knowledge, of the self, of other, and of the world. This writer is ambitious, taking on topics that others avoid, in life and in writing, and then fluidly providing us with not answers but beautiful explications of an unending question.

Kate Harding is the author of Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture and co-editor of Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump’s America. She holds an MFA in fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is working on a PhD in creative nonfiction at Bath Spa University. She lives in Miami.

HONORABLE MENTION:
“S,” by David Stevens

J. David Stevens teaches creative writing at the University of Richmond. His most recent essays appear or are forthcoming in Post Road, River Teeth, The Gettysburg Review, and The Denver Quarterly. His collection of short stories, I and You, will be published in 2019 by Arc Pair Press.

Flash Prose Contest, by Finalist Judge Nicole Walker

WINNER:
“Flight Path” by Amy Butcher

Walker on “Flight Path”:

I chose Flight Path as the winner of the Sonora Review Flash Prose prize because of its thick layering. Referencing cultural touchstones as diverse W.H. Auden and Jeopardy, this piece stacks everything we thought we knew about Icarus and Daedalus and then piles more on. The images of the would-be immigrants tucked into the wheelhouses of airplanes makes those thick stories immediate. Too immediate and hard to hear, but necessary. The final stark image of not wax but metal becomes a hot, stark mirror.

RUNNER UP:
“When People Back Home Ask Me What Winters in Marquette Are Like” by Krys Belc

Walker on “When People Back Home”:

I chose When People Back Home Ask Me What Winters in Marquette Are Like for the way it encounters, with humor and a strict matter of fact voice, the transphobia and homophobia as well narrator’s sense of self. The humor is dark but transporting. Out of fairness, no one, especially not the narrator, gets cut any slack because the narrator illustrates beautifully the equal fragility of everyone’s heart.